1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical information processing apparatus.
2. Description of Related Art
In the medical field, image reading is performed by displaying medical images generated in various modalities and by a physician observing the condition of a lesion. Then, the physician who performed the image reading creates an interpretation report which includes his/her findings relating to the image on the interpretation report creation screen.
Such interpretation report includes plurality of items which should be input, such as type of lesion, anatomical section, level, condition, conclusion and the like and this causes great burden on the physician who creates an interpretation report.
To help creation of interpretation reports, for example, there is suggested a technique to create an interpretation report by detecting an abnormality in image data and using the combination of the type of the detected abnormality and its position (see JP 3332104, for example). Further, there is suggested a technique to create an interpretation report by searching a case which is similar to the diagnosis target image of the patient from his/her past cases and using the report of the similar case (see JP 5128154, for example).
However, in the techniques described in JP 3332104 and JP 5128154, since anatomical sections and abnormal shadows in image data are recognized by image analysis, there is a possibility that image analysis may fail depending on the image condition due to the disease condition of the subject. In such case, an appropriate interpretation report cannot be created and as a result, workload of interpretation report creation cannot be reduced.
Further, in the techniques described in JP 3332104 and JP 5128154, the processing of image analysis and the like takes time due to narrowing down of the anatomical sections and abnormal shadows if there are great number of anatomical sections and lesions to cover various types of anatomical sections and lesions. Therefore, there has been a problem such that a physician cannot start image reading and interpretation report creation right after a medical image is captured.